Rockford Director Earns Award At Sundance Film Festival

Rockford native Bing Liu's documentary was getting pretty good buzz at the Sundance festival all week. Now he has some hardware to go with the accolades.

RegisterStar - Former Rockford resident Bing Liu won the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking for his locally produced documentary “Minding the Gap” at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Liu's documentary, set in Rockford, follows three skateboarding teens as they grapple with issues about fatherhood. The film was one of 16 documentaries up for the award.

Liu attended Guilford and East High Schools in town before heading down to Champaign to major in film at the University of Illinois.

No word on when the film will be released in theaters but the good news is that they now have a distributor for the film, London-based Dogwoof. Once release dates are set I'm sure that there will be screenings in town.

Until then you can take a look at a little documentary, about skateboarding of course, that he put together for the park district in their Our City, Our Stories series. It's pretty cool.